A few years ago I met the legendary designer John Maeda. "As social media links people and ideas together in unprecedented new ways, and as design tools become accessible to many", I asked him, "are we about to benefit from a world with a thousand times as many active designers?" "Great question!" he replied.

It's fair to say that very little design or engineering talent has been applied to my local station Denmark Hill since Queen Victoria was alive. I use this place a lot. It's the primary mass-transit feed to Kings College Hospital, one of London's most important hospitals, which is five minutes walk away. It's used for 3.1 million passenger journeys each year. So the equivalent of about a twentieth of the entire British population stumble through this little inner London railway station each year.

And stumble they must. Despite a refurbishment in the 1980s, it's been woefully inadequate for as long as most people can remember. All four rail platforms must be reached by steep wooden steps, all of which are in poor condition. Water pours through the roof during rain, directly onto these steps and all passengers are filtered through a narrow inner and outer doorway, via a 19th century booking hall. At peak times during the morning and evening, exacerbated by timetabling that means many of the half hourly train services arrive within minutes of each other, this Victorian grouping of steps gets badly overcrowded. Many of the users of the station are visiting hospital, so the demographic skew of passengers is towards the elderly or the physically impaired.

I wonder what the Victorian engineers who built the place would think about the reconstruction project that started to affect public access to the station this week.

Work is underway to provide much better access to the station - on paper the plans look great, or at least the reporting of them (plans are not easy to find online, nor made available at the station - if you find them let me know).

A lesson in poor design

Work has begun but the implementation hasn't been thought through. I'm particularly surprised by the lack of attention paid to access - the service experience for users - during the transition phase. It can only confuse passengers who use the station (many are occasional visitors, exacerbating this) and it provides even worse accessibility during the construction work, which seems expected to last about a year.

- On Wednesday the existing station access bridges and staircases, which have always channeled passengers through the booking hall, were closed. Now passengers use a temporary scaffolding-based bridge and network of staircases that is if anything more overcrowded than the old (deeply inadequate) arrangement.

- Passengers exit onto a side access road, Windsor Walk. However, this new entrance is very poorly signposted.

- Inexcusably, no Oyster card readers are installed at the new entrance, or on the platforms. London's Oyster card system requires all rail users to "touch in" and "touch out" on arrival and departure, and not doing so will lead to a daily cap fine being imposed of about £5 extra. Last night, in the warren-like confusion of the new exits, I completely forgot to touch out and had to call Oyster today to get my fine reversed. I am absolutely sure I'm not alone here.

- Now users are expected to walk right around the station into the old booking hall, to touch in or out after each journey, far from the new temporary entrance and exit. This imposition seems absolutely at odds with the project's goal, which is, a year from now, to provide dramatically improved accessibility.

- Communication about the changes is poor or non-existent. There are some basic posters but no detailed project plan is available online. Nor are progress updates being posted. I'm working with organisations who do far better updates building toilet blocks in Africa. There's a Wikipedia entry about the station and that would be a great place to link to formal plans and timelines. The lack of status updates reduces my confidence that the project is well-led. Or even led at all. I think the original Victorian designers would be amazed that with the advances in technology, we can't do better.

Some years ago I dipped once before into the planning of Camberwell's local infrastructure. A grim, vicious public meeting about the Camberwell Grove railway bridge (beautifully captured in all its misery by the Guardian's Peter Preston) left me disillusioned by the limited ambitions of those who are employed to improve London's public infrastructure.

As 21st century designers, we can do much better. Designing and redesigning stations is about more than just engineering work. Clearly, little thought has been applied to the interim needs and experience of the unique demographic that uses this station. There's an army of kids out there without jobs, and many have been trained in media, design and communication. With the right support, they could run rings around these efforts. Maybe, it's time we got them involved.

Just to prove that in Britain we're living right now through a remake of 1978-83, my walk to work through Camberwell and Peckham featured a couple of proper British '70s Fords today - a 1979 Escort MkII estate and a slightly older Cortina MkIII.

Cars are a really powerful way to date a photograph - or instil the identity of an era in a photo - because the mix of them usually changes much more quickly than the built environment around them. As a child of '71, these Fords are the tin I grew up surrounded by.

I'm fascinated by ways we might see the market for "classic cars" go more mainstream over the next decade. New technologies make it easier to manufacture (or remanufacture) short run products, the web makes it easier to market and source components or share expertise on repairs and fixes. And it's become easier to share a car like this amongst a devoted fan club, all of whom publish the car's interaction with the world, share responsibility for looking after it, and reinforce its place in their lives with tools like Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next.

In contrast I chatted with Joe Simpson a few weeks ago about the desire in most modern car companies to design cars to specifically target customer categories, nailed down to the last detail. He's seeing a lot of this at the moment, even in the booming Asian markets. This is a folly - society defines the image and role that cars play in their lifetime and there is a limit to how clever designers and marketeers should get. The Golf GTI was a hobby project by German VW engineers, that went on to become an icon of the 1980s yuppie era in Europe. The Volkswagen camper van was never conceived to service America's alternative scene - the surf and hippie scenes took the vehicle and made it their own.

I suggested to Joe that modern car companies should design great vehicles that do a good job and let the customers, and the era they live in, define how they fit in and what they eventually come to mean. Those of us designing digital products right now would never dream of assuming we know exactly how users will take and use what we create - in fact, our success will be defined by how users pick up our products and make them their own.

Kenny (my dad) said recently that he felt that music was losing its connection with time - "new" music is less of a mass experience that crosses generations (listen to a typical '70s or '80s hit and ask if anything equivalent ever crosses multiple generations now) - so instead we slice and dice the past in new, multiple ways. After all, we have access to a massive back catalogue.

Why might the same not happen with cars? One thing's for sure - a proper fashion shoot featuring one of these motors would right now trump something featuring a brand new car design. New is no longer about actually being new - it's more complicated than that.

How do you "provide a catalytic intervention" for a city or region? And how do you bring the character and future of a city to life online? Mark Charmer talks to Vinay Gupta about doing both, in Wolverhampton.

At the beginning of last month I had the chance to present mine and Tom's initial thinking on the opportunity in Wolverhampton, to the attendees of City Camp London. Here's the slide deck I used that day (which for obvious reasons starts by explaining how far Wolverhampton is from London).

We're actually now moving ahead with a small funded project to cover Phase 1. Drop me a line if you would like to get involved either via Twitter or at mark[at]movementdesign[dot]org. I really appreciated Dominic Campbell giving me so much time in front of the audience.

We're starting a new project in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton. Eventually I hope it will help the city position itself more vibrantly, get under the skin of its heritage and get a series of funded projects moving that will give the place a buzzing, future focus. We have our first proper project meeting, with the chief executive of Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Warren, and his assistant Joanne Lancaster on 28th April. I first met Simon last autumn while we were both on a panel making the case for smarter cities at The Guardian in Kings Cross, hosted by IBM. We got on right away. Before running cities (Rugby and now Wolverhampton) he was head of Strategic Management for NATO. Enough said.

This is a perfect project to involve some talented people I've had my eye on for some time. Joe Simpson is tied up on work at the Royal College of Art, Car Design News and secret projects for the auto industry for the time being, though he may get involved later (Joe's great value on Twitter in the interim). So for the first time, I get the chance to work with Tom Wynne-Morgan. Tom and I first started talking a few years ago. He's a designer and researcher with an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. Almost everything he does (such as his blog and the fascinating AlterFutures), and the way he looks at problems, intrigues me so I'm really excited about having him work closely with me. Tom also works at Engine, a well-regarded service design consultancy, based nearby in Bermondsey. Tom also has a very cool bike.

We're going to work hard to share progress with Wolverhampton as we go, so I look forward to having you along for the ride.

A friend was telling me this week how he felt that so little of our environment today seems to be have been constructed with an intention of permanence, or even a sense of what a permanent thing should be.

I read Stefan Zweig's description this morning of a journey he took from Paris in 1924, seeking respite from this city "that now explodes into a thousand flying sparks". He makes the hour and a half's journey to Chartres, to see its cathedral.

He is moved by its scale and purpose. I thought what he said was really interesting, and relevant:

"For this church had room for an entire generation and that is its heroic lesson, eternally big enough for all earthly aspirations, eternally able to exceed all possibilities and now forever a symbol of infinity. They simply wished to immortalise their faith, those who raised this cathedral in the heart of this flat country, forging in stone to preserve their pious will beyond their own time.

For never again will such works arise in our epoch, which measures time in a different way and lives at an altogether different pace: man will build no more cathedrals.

Our plans demand accomplishment at speed, our rhythm of life becomes ever more frantic, and there is no single work that lasts beyond a generation and none even that reaches beyond a single life. We who thanks to a spark are capable of communicating with another continent in a second, we no longer know how to articulate our being across the slowness of stones, the infinitude of years.

Our miracles are manageable and intellectual, our dreams more compact. Now the soul takes leave of the huge rising form of something that has become alien to it, like the Pyramids or the Parthenon; we have lost our capacity for the eternal, which the world itself has gained, and our capacity to incarnate the spirit of a whole people or the genius of a time in a single work. So then, it's over: men will build no more cathedrals."

But then Zweig travels back towards Paris:

"And yet, as the return train made its way through the darkening evening landscape, before the sign itself, the presentiment of Paris loomed: the giant city, a glowing cupola atop a reddish vault on the horizon, rising up into an invisible sky...

Indestructable, this glowing dome of light reigns above the seething nocturnal city, this union of countless electrical energies and the ferverently pulsing lives of millions forms the most impressive cathedral of our epoch... Radiant with celestial light and raised on high in the listening night, this new cathedral of Paris would perhaps have appeared to the builders of yesterday just as splendid, as mighty and divine as the works they left seem now to our eyes.

Epochs have used different signs to engrave their face on the landscape of the earth, and nothing is more wonderful than in the space of an hour to read, to understand and to love (as much as they may seem strangers to each other) one sign and the other expressing their will to live."

As I said, Zweig wrote this in 1924.
Posted by Mark Charmer. Sunday 6 March 2011.

Jaguar officially celebrated its 75th Birthday on Friday. And to mark the event, a convoy of 75 Jaguars, featuring every model the firm has made since 1935, left Millenium square in Coventry on Friday morning for Wellington Barracks, opposite the Queen's modest pile somewhere in London, SW1. Having celebrated the anniversary of Sir William Lyons' unveiling of the very first Jaguar model - the SS, in the same room of the Mayfair hotel on Friday night, on Saturday morning the cavalcade resumed its journey, heading to Goodwood and the weekend's Revival festival.

What really made this event special were the owners and the untold, unseen stories behind the cars here. The cars on this run weren't just from Jag's own special heritage fleet, or examples that are molly-coddled within an inch of their lives and never used. Owners had brought examples of just about every single model the company's ever made to Coventry - and had then gone through what must have been, frankly, the unnerving process of being paired with a journalist for the trip, who they'd never met and who they then let drive their pride and joy. I travelled with Matthew Nice in his pristine 1967 3.8 S-type, who's story was quite unique. When he was young, Matthew lived with his mum and his grandad, who had bought this very car when it was just a few months old. His grandad ran it until he died, and although Matthew at the time was just 15, his mum realised the attachment and sentimental value the car held, so tucked it away in a barn rather than selling it as part of his grandad's estate. Roll forward to 1997, and Matthew began what turned into a 9-year project to bring the car up to the fully restored, concours condition you see today. The car had never been back to Coventry, nor visited London, and I was only the 8th person to ever drive it. The experience was as magical as one might expect. Driving a car without modern brakes, that doesn't have wing mirrors and that foregoes a radiator fan can prove an occasional challenge in modern traffic, but we made it to Goodwood unscathed, despite the best efforts of London's kamikaze bus drivers and traffic in Knightsbridge on a friday afternoon.

Jaguar has had a troubled existence over much of the past 30-40 years. I've always held Ford somewhat responsible for failing to develop the brand's real potential over the past 15 years or so - but talking to many (much more knowledgable) folk on this trip, changed my view somewhat. The real dispise is reserved for British Leyland; the consensus view being that Ford spent the best part of 20 years with its hands full simply trying to put right the damage done in the 70s. Today, with a fresh and competitive product line-up and under the new ownership of Tata, there is much hope and much expectation about where the brand can go. There are issues of course. Jaguar's 'beautiful fast cars' mantra perhaps sits uncomfortably in an age of apparent financial austerity and environmental imperatives, while despite the improved products, the brand still appeals to a more mature, overtly male market than is ideal. Yet the sense of occasion, together with the exceptionally well executed planning - not to mention investment - that went into this event suggests that the people now running the company have an understanding of how to take the brand forward for the next 75 years. It won't be easy - and much will depend on the investment and autonomy provided by its Indian parents - but I sincerely hope that my children will get to see this brand celebrating its 150th year come 2085.

Favourite photos from the weekend below, while at the bottom of the page click on a link to a photoset of the weekend.

I sat in St James's Park this lunchtime with Robert Brook. We talked quite a lot about organisations, and how broken so much seems right now - and how hard it is for our institutions to make things work at the pace that is possible, that people expect, that technology promises.

I got to meet @redmamba, who was great. We talked about the risk that people become locked, repressed, almost imprisoned in organisational process that means they can't make things better, achieve change, and all the other things that those with fire in their belly want to do.

I explained how I often think that the problem is that people are hired not to do other things - they're locked into one role, one problem. This is used to keep them away from doing other things.

Photo: Westminster, London. 19 July 2010.

Today was the day that David Cameron outlined more about his "Big Society" vision. I explained that I'd walked to work this morning wondering why none of the truly progressive people I know seem to have been welcomed as part of it.

Robert talked about those "doing the real work". Those focused on small pieces, that all add up. He was kind enough to say he thought I fitted in that category, as did our pal Dominic Campbell. I promised to publish a piece I'd written recently about how people define success.

I talked about Austin Williams, my old friend at the Future Cities Project, who for years has been arguing about the risks of a rise in "parochialism". With its carefully chosen case studies from two spots in Cumbria (one reasonably well off rural, one fairly poor suburban) the whole Big Society thing has that air about it.

I talked about how I'd got to meet Charles Handy, finally, a few weeks ago. I enthused about Handy's amazing late '80s book, "The Age of Unreason", which set out a future where people would have "portfolio lives". This feels more relevant than it ever has been, yet Handy's out of fashion. I told Handy how his writing had shaped my entire career - how I'd built my work on those principles, but how disappointingly few other people seen to have done so, even though it makes sense. He seemed genuinely delighted that I had.

Robert and I discussed the disappearance of "management education" as a remotely credible, useful activity since the decline in MBAs. He felt that maybe some other kind of leadership techniques would emerge, some other kind of leadership culture perhaps.

I was approached by a teenage girl asking if I could take a picture of her and her friends. Which I did (having turned them around so the light would be better). She was really polite and cheerily thanked me as they walked away.

I asked Robert about how he uses Twitter - that his use of it seems so intense, that does it not take over? He was amazingly relaxed about the whole thing. For him it's just something that's there - if it wasn't, he wouldn't mind. I suggested that maybe if he'd been alive in a different era, he just would have quickly mastered different tools of the era - that some people just grasp such tools ahead of others.

Two weeks ago a man called Mark Nitzberg did a lovely thing - he sent me an iPad from California. Mark's a board member at the Akvo Foundation, where I spend much of my time right now. He wants to know what I think about it - how it changes the way we use computers, whether it's any good, and whether you can read a book all day on it. So I've been giving it a whirl. I'll write more about the actual device, and what the big deal is over the coming days. But the thing is, I can't really describe the iPad to you until I do a bit of a recap - a few snippets of my perspective on the evolution of personal computers. So here goes.

In 1993, I got a job at Apple Computer. It wasn't in Cupertino, or even (as you might expect as a Brit) in Stockley Park, near Heathrow. It was in Warsaw, Poland.

Set on Jana Sobieskiego, a particularly bleak stretch of road out in the Warsaw suburb of Mokotóv, Apple Poland HQ was above a hat factory (filled with scary old ladies), and an Amway franchise (filled with scary Americans).

I was there for about a year, and learned a lot. Apple, "in between Jobs", so to speak, was struggling. Although its state of limbo was one of those things that I only really understood with hindsight. I was surrounded by technology. I shared an office with two guys. Marcin and I would throw paper at eachother all day while doing "marketing". Andrjez, a wonderful kindly man, would sit at a Mac Quadra 950, carefully designing Polish fonts to be used in Mac System 7. Because his computer had a 33MHz Motorola 68040 processor, it was actually categorised as a super-computer, requiring a special import license into this fragile new democracy, just four years beyond the collapse of communism.

I had a Powerbook 170. With an active matrix black and white screen, it was the absolute business - a dark grey wonder that was full of original ideas. It had the keyboard set back close to the screen, and a "track ball" - a dead-ringer for a pool ball - set on a ledge at the front of the computer. It had folders dotted around the desktop, and I could write wherever I was because it was genuinely portable, with little feet that twisted around at the back. I could connect it via "Appletalk" to other computers. I think we even had staff electronic mail running.

It's difficult now to describe just how dull most computers were back in the early '90s - after an '80s childhood of BBCs and Spectrums, Killer Gorilla and Donkey Kong, the personal computer future had fizzled into a way to run a digitized version of the 1970s office. I could type my own memos, print things off myself, decide where to save things and what to call them. I could even now take my computer with me to other places and use it there as well. While I was there, I could make things bold - or even italic. I could do all the things people could do in the 1970s, without needing support staff.

One day what looked like a pizza box arrived with a monitor on top, that had speakers. It was a Mac Centris 660AV, the first computer to be imported into Poland, as far as we knew, that could show video snippets and play music clips. It had a fancy innovation called a DSP, which stood for Digital Signal Processor. That meant it actually had another computer processor inside, which handled most of the video and sound. The clips were pretty tiny on screen - and the sound was okay but we all had CDs, which seemed much more useful, because they connected quickly to your hifi. So most people would say, "well what can you do with that?" And to be honest none of us had a good answer. It also had something called "GeoPort", which meant you could use a modem, so the computer could connect through telephone lines. But we didn't really use that.

One of the guys was also toting an Apple Quicktake 100 digital camera. Most people couldn't understand the point of that, either. I think it cost about $400 (to put this in context my Polish salary then was $200 per month, and that was above average). It could hold 8 photographs at 640x480 resolution. Which you couldn't do much with. Even bleak early '90s Mokotóv was blossoming with colourful Fuji and Kodak and Agfa signs above shops, where you could take your film camera and get prints developed, sometimes while you waited. So people would say, "Why would you want a digital camera when a film camera is really cheap and more useful?"

In early 1994, I was given an Apple Newton Messagepad. It was tiny - well actually it wasn't. It was an alien size - quite long and bulky. But it just had a screen - and no keyboard. Well actually, it had a stylus, a plastic thing that you knew you'd lose. And you would attempt to write on the screen and watch it convert each character into words. I took it out to a dinner with American and Irish friends that night and passed it around the table. Everyone thought it was fun, but noone could really make it work properly. And by the time it got back around to me, the batteries were dead. It was a digital notepad, for which there was no need.

Late that year I went back to London and worked for Apple, then Compaq, then Dell then HP, later in the '90s.

Apple and all the others spent a long time playing around with technologies that weren't yet really ready. But all this stuff is ready now. When I first got hold of an iPad two weeks ago, it felt like an alien size, but as an iPhone user it's all so familiar to use. But it is really different to any other computer.

The point of the iPad is that people can actually watch and read material off the internet. They can do it for ten hours. They can do it without sitting poised like a typist. That first Apple Powerbook 170 I had was bold enough to put a trackball at the front of the portable computer, and let the keyboard sit behind it. Apple's now been bold enough, and clever enough, to remove the keyboard altogether. A year ago this would have been premature. But now the internet is easy to use by just clicking around most of the time.

Microsoft's tablet computers, sold half-heartedly by PC makers, were insufficiently developed and timed too early. In computers, as in most things, timing is everything. Apple's timing is impeccable.

People who say the iPad isn't any good are the people that think the world is worse now than it was in 1955, or 1965, or '75, '85, '95 or 2005.

It isn't. It's a better world. The iPad is great - a product absolutely in tune with its time, not too far ahead or in any way behind. And it'll make the next ten years much more interesting. Just watch – or read, or follow.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Photo: the Sign / Movement Design Bureau kit museum in Bermondsey includes a Powerbook 160, a close relative of that PB170 I mentioned earlier. London, 5 May 2010.

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad
A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites
Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops
Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets
Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes
A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings
Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

8. Better education for cyclists
Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.